Grief

 

Winning Words: Taming Dragons in a Soup Bowl

 

A bunch of surfer dudes,
sun-bleached blonde and sun-browned,
inch their way across the rocky shore,
Soup Bowl bound,
tentative as firewalkers
treading unshod on red coals.

Then, with jaws firmly set,
breasts pressed to boards,
these knights of the sea
paddle fearlessly forward, 
to face the fabled dragon waves,
whose lair is the Soup Bowl. 

Winning Words: Home

 

When he comes  
He waits patiently by the door. 
He knocks softly. 
Gently.
He asks,
May I come in? 
Are you at home? 
Is now a good time? 

Winning Words...And Saving Lives

Casting out again.  This edition's cover is by Kai Miller.  

 

A version of the following speech was presented by ArtsEtc Editor Robert Edison Sandiford at the launch of The ArtsEtc NIFCA Winning Words Anthology 2017/2018 held at the Daphne Joseph-Hackett Theatre November 14, 2019.

GOOD EVENING, ladies and gentlemen, artists and patrons, art sponsors and art angels.

I suspect what I’m about to say will sound a little like a vote of thanks.   This is, maybe more so than in past years, inevitable.

Petroglyphs and pictographs: after Ron Savory (1933-2019)—In Memoriam

 

“...artefacts air-brushed from memory, teasing

holograms in glass globules, daring translation:

What can I make for you of those old bones, those scratched pebbles?”  Lee

 

i. earth: catacomb

 

earth-stones speak from Mazaruni galleries of petroglyphs and pictographs

 

murmur scratched names, carved mysteries, ancient runes of Rupunini

Lessons from Poetry: Complaint and Sorrow in Kamau Brathwaite’s Liviticus

WE HAD a close encounter in our house a couple months back. It was unplanned, unexpected and poetic in nature.

With that casual, don’t-carish air teenagers practice so well, my daughter picked up the review copy of Kamau Brathwaite’s Liviticus, published by House of Nehesi, that has occupied space in our front-house for a while now (along with overdue library books and other unfinished titles) and read the whole thing—thirty pages—out loud, including earthy, elegant foreword by Garrett Hongo and the author’s bio at the end.

A Review of John Robert Lee's Collected Poems 1975-2015

COLLECTED POEMS 1975-2015 by John Robert Lee represents one man’s spiritual journey meandering through thorny labyrinths of faith, “from inner city provinces to southern islands of Amerika” (“Challenger”). This journey began long before 1975: when a young Lee witnessed his father, Alleyne, relishing a dessert of fresh ripe mangoes on a Sunday afternoon and began to contemplate seriously his romance with the written word.

Pages